THERE'S GOOD SPORT BY THE SEA

New Zealand Listener, Volume 3, Issue 71, 1 November 1940, Page 22

THERE'S GOOD SPORT BY THE SEA

In which "THID" recommends another strange sport for consideration but only, he says, by those people who realise that two and two seldom add to four.

IRST of all, when you are by the sea, there is the sea; which is almost sufficient, and makes it quite impossible to describe the sport of coasting as a solitary sport. When you are by the sea it is impossible to be solitary, for all the time the sea is talking: soothing or remonstrating, or making threats. Here is a playmate for you, one of those children whose company is a delight when they are in the mood to be pleasant, and a dangerous matter when their temper is up. One game we play, is the game called Crossing the Cove. You find one of those narrow places beneath cliffs, where rocks are parted by the waves and a small arc of rough shingle is the pathway between Safety on the one side and Destination on the other. It is hard to run fast across this shingle, but speed is urgent until you find out that one wave does not follow another so quickly after all. You wait for the wave that does not come so far as its fellows, and you watch for tense minutes to discover the sequence that governs the action of the big ones. When you are ready (and just about to die with excitement) your legs vand feet move under you while the wave -Tetreats, and your playmate, if she is _kind, comes only far enough to kiss your bare feet as you scramble up the other side. If she intends to be unkind, the vixen will frighten you as only a lover can be frightened by the moods of his sweetheart. She tears at your legs and heaves the stones up around you; splashes up to catch your waist and surges round you to pull you back. At such moments she is not nice. It is as well that you have known her when she was kind. ‘Taking Things for Granted There are people who take the sea as a matter of course. There are people who turn on their electric light without thinking of the pylons marching with dipping cables across the hills. There are people who ride in trains and do not see the furnace as the firebox door swings open, or the sweat on the arms of the stoker, and the driver’s eyes crinkled into the thrusting beam of the headlight. There are people, no doubt, who read the war news and listen to Daventry ‘and yet do not: know in themselves what happens when high explosive bursts. And there are people who are not afraid of the sea. This would not be much of a game for them. When the wave came up round them and boiled through the rocks they would feel only the wetness and have | no vision at all of the strange things | in the depths the wave came from; the ‘long streamers of the weed in the cur- | rents, the rocks and the things that live on them, the green light and the darkness lower down. Sosa oy aetge

Hopping Rocks They do not know the sea, and bad cess to them anyway; but even most of them would know themselves in the ‘presence of something strange to human kind if they could see the beds upon beds of sea anemones I saw last week, I was playing the game of Hopping Rocks, which is also a good game, but not so bad for the heart. There are places around the coast where the cliffs have fallen in under the action of wind and water, and among the pinnacles and boulders left behind there are many deep pools with much strange life existing in them. With this game you hop from one rock to another and stop whenever same new trick of light or patch of colour catches your eye. The anemones caught mine. Blood red they were, and made me think of gipsies. Pool Gazing Those are two of the more strenuous branches of the sport of Coasting. Too strenuous? Well, try that other game called Pool Gazing. . You: lie on’ your stomach at the edge of a pool and watch to see what happens, Something always does, It may be a'crab, or a starfish, the one so ridiculously reminiscent of antediluvian Ford with the king-pins. gone; the other so dull that it seems he will never be in time for breakfast. Sometimes the camouflage is not quite good enough to disguise the feeler of a lobster searching out from a hiding place among the weeds. It is fun to put a hand gently down and have the thing examine it curiously. I suppose a human hand, split so alarmingly into five ends, looks as uncouth to a lobster as the

lobster looks to us. Probably more so, because. we can express our contempt for the lobster by boiling him in his own element, and all the lobster can do to us is to take an occasional nip. Poor lobster! There are many other departments of the Sport of Coasting. There is Feet Bathing and Wrist Cooling; Cod Fishing, Stone Throwing, and Kelp Carving; Rock Climbing, Cave Exploring, and Teasing Gulls; the variety is endless as well as euphonic. The Size of the Sea But the. most interesting thing about the sea, quite apart from these occasional small wonders, is the size of the sea. Sometimes.I have thought some rivers must be pretty big. But- when you see them flowing into the sea, and the sea not rising at all except by the tide, then they do not seem very big at all. It is impossible to make any impression on it in any way. All true sportsmen want to, just as men want to explore Antarctica and climb mountains. They can get to the Poles, and it is only a fable that Everest will never be climbed, and they can leaye their marks here and there where they go on the land: But on the sea, whether it is calm or tossing, they can go only by taking the big hazardy and no footprints are left anywhere; It is indeed a formidable thing to play with and yet, while it nourishes the octopus in the seaweed pools it throws white foam brightly upward to the sun. You will see, before you try this sport, that it is necessary to realise that ‘two and two very seldom equal four.